Preparing to reveal his life story, Clay Benton bowed his head and knelt to pray. The 18-year-old has been telling lies for much of his life, so speaking the truth isn't easy, even among other recovering addicts.

“I don't know exactly where to start because I only have, like, 30 minutes to share,” Benton told his classmates, who joined him in a loose circle. His voice steady but soft, Benton started with age 13. He said his parents had split, he missed his dad and that's when, and perhaps why, he began smoking pot.

“I was like, ‘This is the solution to everything,' ” he said. “I thought it was the best thing in the world.”

Benton's story — which quickly spirals from recreational drug use to dependence — is a familiar one at Archway Academy, a Houston high school that caters to recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Large, traditional high schools with overworked counselors don't work for the students here. At Archway, they take the usual academic classes and get extra emotional support from staff — several are in recovery themselves — and from their peers.

Charter funding

Archway's teachers and curriculum come from Southwest Schools, a state-funded charter campus. Students must pay fees to cover drug testing and other program costs.

The school opened in 2003 with six students, and this year it enrolls 69. The teens hail from inner-city Houston and the suburbs. Among them, they've served jail time, been homeless, survived rape, attempted suicide and watched friends die. Some got kicked out of other schools; some chose to leave.

To be accepted into Archway, the teens had to meet several conditions, including two months of sobriety and a referral from an approved therapy group. The school is one of about two dozen so-called recovery high schools nationwide.

“The kids have to earn the right to come here,” said Sasha McLean, Archway's executive director.

High rate of sobriety

National statistics show that four of every five teens who get clean and return to the same environment where they got into trouble will relapse within 90 days, according to McLean. At Archway, where the students are drug tested at random, the sobriety rate was 87 percent last year.

McLean emphasizes that Archway is not a boot camp. Students don't walk through metal detectors, and they don't wear uniforms. The school is housed at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, a historic yellow stucco building whose arched windows overlook Hermann Park, which serves as the school's gym. Students also can do yoga for physical education credit.

Discipline at Archway is based on a point system — get them if you behave, lose them if you don't. Earn enough, and you get perks such as drinking soda in class and listening to music during downtime.

“Our policy is, we don't expect you to be perfect, but we expect you to be honest,” McLean said. Each morning begins with check-in, the school's version of health class. In short, the teens share what's troubling them — tiffs with boyfriends, the urge to use again — so their minds are clear for the day. Class sizes at Archway are small, and the students usually sit around a table to facilitate discussion.

“They're used to stimulation from drugs,” said McLean, a recovering alcoholic. “We're trying to keep them from getting bored.”

The students' academic backgrounds vary when they enter Archway.

“We've got really bright kids that despite their drug and alcohol issues managed to keep their grades up,” McLean said. “And then we've got kids that even though they got credit for school, they didn't learn a thing because they sat high as a kite in their classes and didn't retain any of that information.”

Last year, 16 of the 18 students who graduated from Archway enrolled in college, McLean said.

Group focus

Friday afternoons are reserved for group activities — field trips, a hip-hop dance class or student-led presentations, such as the one Benton did recently with his girlfriend, Nicole. Within three months of smoking marijuana, Benton said, he drank alcohol too. He vowed to stop after his mom caught him.

But, Benton said, “The next day I left school and got high.”

Benton's family sent him to one treatment center after another, but he kept using drugs and kept lying about it. Then, last summer, during therapy at Sundown Ranch in Canton, east of Dallas, Benton got clean.

The therapists, he said, had found a way to cut through the lies.

For the first time in years, Benton could claim 80 days of sobriety. Soon after, he enrolled in Archway, afraid he'd fall into old habits if he returned to Cypress Woods High School.

“Everybody I got high with goes there. I still hold back my feelings, and I still struggle a lot with integrity,” he told his classmates. “But the difference is today I don't use that easy access like watching porn or getting high. I work through it. I don't know if that hit any of you, but hopefully it did.”

The students applauded and ended the day as they always do, standing in a circle, arms around each other, to recite the Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”